Her choice of terms was certainly strange, and as she leaned back on the white slippery sofa and beckoned me with one of those unburied hands my impulse was to turn and run. But her old face, hovering there in the candle-light, with the unnaturally red cheeks like varnished apples and the blue eyes swimming in vague kindliness, seemed to appeal to me against my cowardice, to remind me that, dead or alive, Mary Pask would never harm a fly. “Do sit down!” she repeated, and I took the other corner of the sofa. “It’s so wonderfully good of you—I suppose Grace asked you to come?” She laughed again—her conversation had always been punctuated by rambling laughter. “It’s an event—quite an event! I’ve had so few visitors since my death, you see.” Another bucketful of cold water ran over me; but I looked at her resolutely, and again the innocence of her face disarmed me. I cleared my throat and spoke—with a huge panting effort, as if I had been heaving up a grave-stone. “You live here alone?” I brought out. “Ah, I’m glad to hear your voice—I still remember voices, though I hear so few,” she murmured dreamily. “Yes—I live here alone. The old woman you saw goes away at night. She won’t stay after dark ... she says she can’t. Isn’t it funny? But it doesn’t matter; I like the darkness.” She leaned to me with one of her irrelevant smiles. “The dead,” she said, “naturally get used to it.” Once more I cleared my throat; but nothing followed. She continued to gaze at me with confidential blinks. “And Grace? Tell me all about my darling. I wish I could have seen her again ... just once.” Her laugh came out grotesquely. “When she got the news of my death—were you with her? Was she terribly upset?” I stumbled to my feet with a meaningless stammer. I couldn’t answer—I couldn’t go on looking at her. “Ah, I see ... it’s too painful,” she acquiesced, her eyes brimming, and she turned her shaking head away. “But after all ... I’m glad she was so sorry.... It’s what I’ve been longing to be told, and hardly hoped for. Grace forgets....” She stood up too and flitted across the room, wavering nearer and nearer to the door. “Thank God,” I thought, “she’s going.” “Do you know this place by daylight?” she asked abruptly. I shook my head. “It’s very beautiful. But you wouldn’t have seen _me_ then. You’d have had to take your choice between me and the landscape. I hate the light—it makes my head ache. And so I sleep all day. I was just waking up when you came.” She smiled at me with an increasing air of confidence. “Do you know where I usually sleep? Down below there—in the garden!” Her laugh shrilled out again. “There’s a shady corner down at the bottom where the sun never bothers one. Sometimes I sleep there till the stars come out.” The phrase about the garden, in the consul’s cable, came back to me and I thought: “After all, it’s not such an unhappy state. I wonder if she isn’t better off than when she was alive?”